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In this dark and gritty collection - featuring short stories from Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Kevin J. Anderson, and Rob Thurman - nothing is as simple as black and white, light and dark, good and evil.... Unfortunately, that's exactly what makes it so easy to cross the line.

It was supposed to be a simple scouting mission. In and out. No fighting. No new quests. Just me, my hippocorn, Alice, and a few hired mercenaries. We were going to tiptoe into the Spiral, get the info we needed, and leave. You know, the Spiral? That tower-defense run that protects the hobgoblin capital from invaders? Easy, right? Nobody would even know we were there. Yeah, so about that....

The virtual world of Barliona is a place of rest and entertainment - but not for everyone. It has become a survival arena for Daniel Mahan after he was sentenced to eight years in its virtual jail. Mahan has been through it all: the back-breaking work in the mines, betrayal by other prisoners, and finally, the retrial which has released him into Barliona's common world. What more could one want? Mahan could have kept a low profile and enjoyed relative freedom while serving the rest of his time.

A striking red-head, 20-something Jody is attacked and transformed into a vampire while walking home one night in downtown San Francisco. Befriending 19-year-old Tommy, Jody tries to understand her new undead life, but trouble finds her when the cops start suspecting Tommy of being a local bloodsucking serial killer.

Not even death can save her now. As a grave witch, Alex Craft can speak to the dead---she's even on good terms with Death himself. As a consultant for the police, she's seen a lot of dark magic, but nothing has prepared her for her latest case.

When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo - an unhatched dragon egg - fate sweeps Captain Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle.

Unchained from fate, the Norse gods Loki and Hel are ready to unleash Ragnarok, a.k.a. the Apocalypse, upon the earth. They’ve made allies on the darker side of many pantheons, and there’s a globe-spanning battle brewing that ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan will be hardpressed to survive, much less win.

For millennia, a secret society known as the Bastion has protected mankind from the horrors of the Underskin—malevolent forces lurking unseen in civilization's shadows. Monsters, demons, spirits, lawyers, and Fortune-500 CEOs, the Underskin's fiends pray upon the weak. When these creatures spill blood, it falls upon the rixators—the Bastion's elite warriors—to cut them down. Armed with ancient relics and modern weaponry, altruistic rixators hold the line against chaos. But a rixator's sworn oath of poverty grinds against Lincoln's life.

Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop.

The downside to faking your own death is that people tend to get upset when they find out they’ve been had. In Atticus O’Sullivan’s case, they’re upset enough to come after him to make sure he dies for real this time. Yet he can’t remain in hiding anymore: He has to bind his apprentice, Granuaile, to the earth so that she can become the first new Druid in centuries.

The Faceless Man, wanted for multiple counts of murder, fraud, and crimes against humanity, has been unmasked and is on the run. Peter Grant, Detective Constable and apprentice wizard, now plays a key role in an unprecedented joint operation to bring him to justice. But even as the unwieldy might of the Metropolitan Police bears down on its foe, Peter uncovers clues that the Faceless Man, far from being finished, is executing the final stages of a long-term plan. A plan that has its roots in London's 2,000 bloody years of history, and could literally bring the city to its knees.

Mack might be, to all intents and purposes, a normal looking human, but she lives with a pack of shapeshifters in Cornwall in rural England after being dumped there by her mother when she was just a young child. She desperately wants to be accepted by her surrogate family, not least because a lot of them hate her for merely being human, but for some reason her blood just won't allow the transformation to occur.

The Droods are all about control, making people do what they're told for the greater good. The Nightside is all about choice: good and bad and everything in between. The Droods want to make the world behave. The Nightside wants to party. They were never going to get along. For centuries, ancient Pacts have kept the Droods out of the Nightside, but now the Droods see the Nightside as a threat to the whole world. They march into the long night, in their armour, to put it under their control. All too soon, the two sides are at war.

After escaping the claws of Corrigan, the Lord Alpha of the Brethren, Mack is trying to lead a quiet lonely life in Inverness in rural Scotland, away from anyone who might happen to be a shapeshifter. However, when she lands a job at an old bookstore owned by a mysterious elderly woman who not only has a familiar passion for herbal lore but also seems to know more than she should, Mack ends up caught in a maelstrom between the Ministry of Mages, the Fae and the Brethren.

The country's only celebrity werewolf, late-night radio host Kitty Norville prefers to be heard, not seen. But when she's invited to testify at a Senate hearing on behalf of supernaturals, her face gets plastered on national television. Kitty has been in hot water before, but jumping into the D.C. underworld brings a new set of problems---and a new set of friends and enemies.

From best-selling author Anne Rice, writing as A.N. Roquleaure, in the traditional folktale of "Sleeping Beauty", the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a prince. It is an ancient story, one that originally emerged from and still deeply disturbs the mind's unconscious. Now Anne Rice's retelling of the Beauty story probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire. Here the prince reawakens Beauty, not with a kiss, but with sexual initiation.

Edgar does not cheat in flower shows. He might use a magically enhanced serum, but anyone could do that. It's not his fault the other competitors don’t know magic exists! But when the Ivy House crew goes to the pre-show to support him, it becomes clear that someone should've been watching Edgar much more carefully. What he's done is way worse than overgrown flora. While Jessie is dealing with that, she gets a shock as she discovers photos of her ex with his girlfriend…turned fiancée. And while the flood of emotions can be ignored, the desire to show off Austin on social media is not.

The battle has been won, but the war is far from over. With her greatest ally at death's door, it's up to Lily Singer to make things right. Troublemaking witch friend and talking cat in tow, she must pursue her father as he seeks to discover an ancient evil and steal its power for himself. But her father isn't the only one seeking that power. When a queen of the fae gets involved and Sebastian's past comes back to haunt him, the three friends have to think fast and act faster to defeat legends that are, unfortunately, no longer in the past.

In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.

Beneath the streets of London there is another London. A subterranean labyrinth of sewers and abandoned tube stations. A somewhere that is Neverwhere....